Anthology Film Archives’s revelatory Quebec-Core series closes with Robert Morin in attendance for a two-day introduction to his half-century tour through the French Canadian margins. The characteristically gritty docufictions Whoever Dies, Dies in Pain (1998) and May God Bless America (2006) make for an intense double feature on Friday, while tonight’s screening of Morin’s first feature, Scale Model Sadness (1987), offers a more subdued, but no less brilliant entrypoint to an oeuvre soon to shed its stateside obscurity. Morin and co-director Lorraine Dufour’s short documentary The Mysterious Paul (1983), about a carnival sword swallower staring down retirement, precedes the film.
At first glance, both the plot and cinematography of Scale Model Sadness suggest an after-school special promoting tolerance for the disabled. Shot on mid-80s video equipment that keeps the entire frame indecorously sharp, the film concerns Jeannot (Yvon Leduc), an adult with Down syndrome living in the suburbs with his protective and incurious parents. He loves cars, swimming, and playing the accordion, but neither he nor his parents consider him “capable” of anything more. Pauline (Marcia Pilote) enters the picture as the live-in caretaker for Jeannot and quickly breaks the family’s banal rhythms by encouraging independence in her charge. The script is graciously free of liberal speechifying and inspiration-mongering; instead, Morrin offers a thing still too rare forty years later: a film that is credibly told from the perspective of a person with a cognitive disability. Jeannot acknowledges his intellectual limitations frequently in his pleasantly monotonic narration, but also provides crucial insight into the inner lives of his family members. His knowledge of them far exceeds their understanding of him.
Jean-Pierre St-Louis’ unfussy cinematography captures the way Jeannot processes the sensory landscape of his sheltered life. When he compares underwater distortions to visions from his dreams, Morin and St-Louis Morin elevate their lo-fi images with invasive close-ups that spare no details. The era’s video textures prove perfect for exploring the physical intimacy of familial relationships; gnarled toes, an ass cheek seen through a plastic shower curtain, furtive tanlines, and powder-coated wrinkles are all silently presented as the raw materials of domestic coexistence. Jeannot’s mother gradually becomes jealous of Pauline’s influence in the home, but Morin doesn’t turn up the heat to Kazanian excess. The psychodrama seethes at the margins while Jeannot tells his story and Morin keeps his cool.
Scale Model Sadness screens tonight, April 17, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the series “Quebec-Core.” Director Robert Morin will be in attendance for a Q&A.
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